DALLAS – Power began to flicker again in much of Texas on Thursday, but millions across the state faced another serious crisis: a shortage of potable water while pipes burst, wells froze and water treatment plants were knocked off offline.
The problems were especially acute in hospitals. One, in Austin, was forced to move some of his most critical patients to another building when the taps were almost dry. Another one in Houston had to tow water onto trucks to flush toilets.
But for many of the state residents who were at home, the emergency meant that the tap water that jumped through their faucet boiled, sought out shops for bottled water or boiling ice cones and dirty snow on their stoves.
For others, it does not mean water at all. Denise Gonzalez, 40, joined a crowd at a temporary relief center in a working-class corner of West Dallas on Thursday where volunteers handed out food from the trunk of a rental bus.
Back at her apartment, she said, the lights were finally on again. But her pipes were frozen. She could not take a bath, shower or use the toilet. She said she called plumbers all day, but one of the few people who responded told her it would be $ 3,000 to assess the damage.
“If I had $ 3,000,” she said. Gonzalez said, “I would not get food from people on the bus.”
Major power outages in Texas left more than four million households without power this week, but by Thursday night, only 347,000 were missing. Many of the nationwide concerns have turned into water problems.
According to a spokesman for the Texas Environmental Protection Commission, more than 800 public water systems serving 162 of the 254 counties in the state have been disrupted. It affected 13.1 million people.
In Harris County, which includes Houston, the country’s fourth largest city, more than one million people have been affected by local water systems that have issued notices to boil water so that it is safe to drink or that can not supply water at all. . Brian Murray, a spokesman for the country’s emergency management agency.
Residents in the capital of Texas, Austin, were also told to boil water due to a power outage at the city’s largest water treatment plant. Austin Water director Greg Meszaros said the falling temperatures are causing water mains to break and pipes to burst, causing an increase in water use and leaking water from the system.
He said Thursday that power has been restored, and that restoration of water services to hospitals and other health care facilities is a priority. The city’s reservoirs, which contain about 100 million gallons of water – or a day’s of water for Austin – have been nearly emptied due to the leaks or the increasing use by residents.
“We never thought of a day where hospitals would not have water,” he said.
For many Texans, the disruption was a staggering inconvenience that drove them back to the state border. People hunted firewood on suburban plots, lived in dark houses, lived on canned food and went without electronics.
Others had more serious consequences. In St. David’s South Austin Medical Center officials on Wednesday night tried to set up a heating system that failed due to low water pressure. They were forced to look for toilets and hand out bottles of water to patients and staff so they could wash their hands.
In San Antonio, Jesse Singh, 58, an owner of the Shell gas station, said his 80-year-old father was turned away from the regularly scheduled dialysis treatments Tuesday and Thursday because his clinic had problems accessing water.
“This is a dangerous situation,” he said. Singh said.
The problem compounded the fact that a large portion of Texas was still experiencing cold weather and blizzards on Thursday, which is part of a devastating winter weather that also dropped snow and caused the storm surge warnings in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut has. Friday night.
Corey Brown, an employee at Tyler Water Utilities – which serves the city of Tyler in northeast Texas – said the temperature was in its 20s on Thursday, hampering efforts to restore the water service. Mr. Brown estimates that half of the 110,000 customers of the utilities are completely without water.
“They had freezing water lines,” he said. ‘We have two water plants – one of which has gone down, and we also have power outages. And then we had a hard freeze the last few days, so many of the pipes freeze as a result and it stops the flow to some people’s houses or causes low pressure. ‘
Days of glacial weather have left at least 38 people nationwide dead, making many roads impassable, disrupting the distribution of vaccines and covering nearly three-quarters of the continental United States in snow. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said they had made 60 generators available “to support critical infrastructure” in Texas and provided state blankets, bottled water and meals.
The head of Texas’ Electric Reliability Council, which operates the state’s power grid, warned Thursday that the state is “not out of the woods yet,” largely because of the persistent cold.
“We are still in very cold conditions, and we are still seeing much higher than normal winter demand,” Bill Magness, the president and CEO of the council, said at a news conference. It said he said planned outages would be needed in the coming days to keep the network stable.
“If we become a bump, or have to come back one generation or another, we may have to ask for interruptions,” he said. “But if we do, we believe they will be at the level where they can turn interruptions, not the larger numbers we faced earlier this week.”
There were other signs of progress. William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, which was forced to close on Wednesday due to the water supply, announced early Thursday morning that it had restored water in a limited capacity, and that flights would resume.
But even though for many Texans the power flickered again, thousands more continued with no light or water. For Angelina Diaz and her four children, Thursday was another day of transportation between their cold store in West Dallas and the cramped SUV in the driveway.
It was Day 4 without a shower or bath. Day 4 without toilet. Day 4 of warming up bottled water on the braai to make the formula for me. Diaz’s 6 month old daughter, Jimena.
The family had been washing diligently for almost a year not to contract the coronavirus, and they were worried that a week without water would undo the efforts.
“How do we keep our hands clean?” Me. Diaz, 25, asked.
Most of their neighbors had electricity on Thursday afternoon, but when utility vehicles drove through the mud, Ms. Diaz loses her patience by sleeping in the car and shivering under the blankets. She was seduced by hotels or heating centers in the city, but worried too much about exposing her family to the virus. So it was back to the SUV to wait.
At the Family Place, a shelter for domestic violence in Dallas, the power had been out for two days when the waterlogged ceiling sank and a freezing waterfall unleashed on the 120 women and children seeking shelter there.
The water soaked their clothes and the few possessions they brought spoiled the hard-to-replace legal documents. The corridors became streams. The residents and staff members tried to wipe out the water and piled up sheets to create dams, but soon gave up and hurriedly piled up in five city buses to seek shelter at a church.
“They basically lost everything,” said Shelbi Driver, a lawyer at the shelter.
Lawyers said at least three other domestic violence shelters around Dallas were also evacuated after pipes burst and flooded their corridors with icy water, displacing hundreds of vulnerable people who did not have the option to go home.
“They went through one terrible trauma, came to our organization to be safe and had another trauma,” said Paige Flink, CEO of Family Place. “It makes me cry just to say it,” she said. “It’s a total nightmare.”
Jack Healy reported from Dallas, Richard Fausset of Atlanta, and James Dobbins of San Antonio. Maria Jimenez Moya Houston’s reporting, and Lucy Tompkins of New York.